With his presidency ending in a few weeks, President Biden’s legacy is only getting messier.

For many Democrats, he’s the man to blame for returning President Trump to the White House.

If only Mr. Biden hadn’t selfishly run for re-election, the story goes, Vice President Harris would have had time to mount a better campaign — or maybe the party could have had a proper primary contest to find somebody, anybody stronger than Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris.

The trouble with that theory is that Democrats haven’t won a presidential election without Mr. Biden on the ticket since 1996. 

Perhaps President Obama didn’t really need Mr. Biden as his running mate in 2008 and 2012; yet he needed someone for the No. 2 slot, and he evidently thought Mr. Biden the best thing available.

Democrats at the time should have pondered what that said about their talent pool. 

If they’d done so, they might have avoided the mistake that really set them up to lose this year — a mistake named Ms. Harris.

Elite Democrats knew perfectly well Mr. Biden was already showing his age, then 77, when he won the 2020 nomination, but at the height of Covid lockdowns, his lack of cogency and energy wouldn’t be noticed on the campaign trail — because there wouldn’t be a campaign trail.

If Mr. Biden was the best the party could field at the ticket’s top, though, what was left below him?

By making Mr. Biden his veep, Mr. Obama had missed the chance to elevate a leader from his own generation. 

And Senator Clinton, hell-bent on having the White House for herself, sucked all the air out of the 2016 primaries, leaving only enough oxygen for Senator Sanders to challenge her from the left — which the then-75-year-old Vermont democratic socialist did surprisingly well. 

Senior Democrats in effect prevented the next generation of leadership from being born — perhaps a fitting thing for a party so fiercely dedicated to abortion. 

What they had in lieu of fresh presidential material was identity politics.

So, fully aware Mr. Biden wasn’t fit to be a two-term president, Democrats accepted Ms. Harris as his running mate.

Her qualification as Mr. Biden’s heir apparent wasn’t that she was popular with voters: On the contrary, she never made it to the first primary in her bid for the 2020 nomination, so pathetic were her polls.

Nor did Ms. Harris represent, like Mr. Sanders, an ideological force within the party; her opportunism was already transparent long before she turned repudiating her own words and past policies into the hallmark of her 2024 campaign. 

What argued for making her Mr. Biden’s running mate was simply her race and sex.

After all, the central message of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign four years earlier had been that a woman deserved to be president.

How could a party that ran on that not put any woman on its ticket next time?

Yet it was also the year of George Floyd, and the party of Black Lives Matter couldn’t afford not to take color into consideration as well.

Ms. Harris wasn’t popular, she wasn’t principled, but she was ambitious — and she ticked the right boxes. 

Yet when a party selects candidates this way, it can’t be surprised that it loses, especially after Mrs. Clinton had already proved identity politics wouldn’t beat Trump.

Elite Democrats may blame Mr. Biden now, but the truth is they knew all about his condition and still preferred to have him run again rather than risk the party’s fortunes on Ms. Harris.

There was no one else: The choice was Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris, and until his debate meltdown — and for some time afterward, in fact — Democratic insiders saw Mr. Biden as obviously the stronger candidate. 

The party sealed its fate in 2020 when it elevated Ms. Harris for reasons having nothing to do with electability.

Yet Democrats put their philosophy to the test: If race and gender preferences are needed in higher education and corporate America to right the wrongs of racism and sexism, isn’t it all the more important those wrongs be righted with preferences at the highest level, that of presidential politics?

Yet trying to do that landed Democrats with a substitute for Mr. Biden who couldn’t win, even with the press branding her opponent an outright fascist.

Ms. Harris’ campaign has divulged its internal polling never showed her ahead.

Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. Obama led Democrats to a dead end.

To escape, the party will have to rethink its identity politics — but given Trump’s gains with Black men and Latinos, Democrats may fear any retreat from affirmative action will unravel their already fraying coalition. 

By rejecting Ms. Harris and electing Trump, however, the nation’s voters — of both sexes and all colors — sent Democrats a clear message. 

The question is whether they’re willing to hear it.

Creators.com